As Dr. Jodi Sherman thought about her residency at Stanford University, she couldn’t help but notice how many medical supplies, plastic, resources — stuff — she was throwing away every day.
“It just felt wrong,” she said. Sherman couldn’t put out of her mind that she was feeding into pollution and dirty air that would, at some point, send more people to hospitals.
“It was clear that we were using so much stuff, it was going somewhere and it was coming from somewhere, and we must be causing so much harm to the environment,” she said. “At the time, there was no resources to understand the magnitude of the problem and be able to guide better practice.”
She made a pact to herself that she wouldn’t practice medicine unless she got involved in greening medical systems.
Ten years later, as an anesthesiologist at Yale University and director of the school’s Program on Healthcare Environmental Sustainability, Sherman is one of many doctors still prodding U.S. hospitals and health systems to take action on sustainability. But without a standard framework, U.S. hospitals are slow to green.
Across the globe, health care is responsible for nearly 5 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, and the United States is among the world’s highest emitters along with China. According to Sherman’s estimate, 8.5 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions came from the health care industry in 2018.
Emissions from running the hospital and its vehicles accounted for 17 percent of the sector’s worldwide footprint, and indirect emissions from steam, electricity, cooling and heating made up another 12 percent. The bulk of health care emissions — about 70 percent — stemmed from the supply chain of goods and services, notably pharmaceuticals, medical devices and food.
A 2018 study found that pollution from health care results in a loss annually of up to 614,000 disability-adjusted life years — a figure that combines years of life lost due to both premature mortality and time lived in states of less than full health.
And the problem goes beyond emissions; the sector also has a huge waste — especially plastic — problem. The health care industry produces around 5.9 million metric tons of medical waste per year in the United States, and of that amount, 1.7 million metric tons is plastic.
“The latest framework is this idea that we have to go zero carbon because we are dramatically approaching climate tipping points,” Sherman said. But in addition to that, “we need to understand more about other dimensions of the issue and how to quantify them — greenhouse gases aren’t the only emissions of concern.”
Where are the numbers?
A hospital is a resource-eating beast — it has to be always alive, prepared and moving. The building and its lights, heat and electricity run 24/7. Trucks move in and out, feeding it medical and food supplies. Waste from single-use devices, gowns, masks and more piles up in the dumpster, waiting to see a landfill. And hundreds of miles away, plastics are molded into gloves, tubes and needles to be used once and thrown out.
Few medical centers in the U.S. are measuring and reporting their emissions, but Harvard Medical School and the Cleveland Clinic are among the exceptions. Harvard is aiming to be fossil-fuel neutral by 2026, and the Cleveland Clinic has a goal to be carbon neutral by 2027.
Other hospitals, like Boston Medical Center, have carbon-neutral goals but don’t publicly track their progress. The Boston facility has pledged to become carbon neutral by 2030 and has won awards for its green initiatives, but it doesn’t publicly report environmental impact or emissionsdata. As hospitals declare sustainability and net-zero goals, green advocates wonder whether there can be accountability without data.
The Cleveland Clinic, a nonprofit medical center, has been pursuing green initiatives since 2007 — strides ahead of other U.S. hospitals.
Not only does the clinic’s Office for a Healthy Environment track and report its emissions across the spectrum, but it’s also one of the first medical facilities to adopt a clinical plastic recycling program, use alternative fuel vehicles including patient transportation vans and buses, and repurpose unused medical tools. It installed the campus’s first solar array over a decade ago.
As a result, the clinic has reduced its carbon intensity by 28 percent since 2007. And its public data report proves it.
“Doctors and nurses see [the sustainability] issue and want to get involved,” said Jon Utech, senior director of the clinic’s Office for a Healthy Environment. “We actually have a custom recycling program that happened because of engaged physicians and nurses — it troubled them to see all these materials being thrown away.”
For example, Utech said the clinic has a program to repurpose medical supplies that were set out but not used during procedures, including catheters, blood pressure cuffs and laparoscopic devices.
But convincing hospital leadership to adopt green goals can be tricky, especially as mergers happen and operations get larger. Existing sustainability and reporting goals can get lost in the shuffle as health companies buy up smaller ones, and it can be hard for physicians and nurses to advocate for green goals as management shifts.
Health Care Without Harm, a global nonprofit organization, is one of the largest operations dedicated to helping hospitals reduce their environmental footprint. For a fee, hospitals and medical systems can become a partner and access materials and advisers through Practice Greenhealth to improve their sustainability.
Although its goal is to set hospitals on a path to net neutrality and public emissions tracking, Sustainability Solutions Director Janet Howard said the organization sometimes has to start small with sustainability goals. Some facilities don’t have the workforce to set up infrastructure needed for robust programs. Others come to Practice Greenhealth with hopes to improve on one issue — like waste reduction — and don’t have the capacity to take on other sustainability problems.
“We do the fundamentals, helping them put the roots down,” Howard said.
But out of Practice Greenhealth’s about 1,400 partners, only 350 shared any sort of environmental data last year. The company also does not require hospitals to make data public.
Howard said that’s because medical facilities that join as partners have environmental programs at different maturity levels — some programs are so new that pushing for tracking and reporting could overwhelm the facilities and deter them from going green. Practice Greenhealth also gives out yearly environmental awards that do require data sharing. But that data is not made public.
“We advocate for [data reporting], but it takes time,” she said. “It can be a heavy lift for some of these hospitals to get their arms around.”
‘Yes, I’m optimistic’
By nature, hospitals’ missions and business models complicate sustainability efforts.
For one, medical systems sometimes struggle already to fulfill their primary calling to care for patients; especially in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic that has taken a huge toll on health care workers and resources, recycling and renewable energy come second to saving lives.
And the market competition that has been driving Wall Street to adopt sustainability measures doesn’t exist for hospitals — when in need, patients typically go to the nearest hospital or the one that best suits their medical needs, regardless of the facility’s green goals.
Although a handful of hospitals have voluntarily adopted emissions tracking, there’s still a push from green-minded doctors across the U.S. for mandatory reporting.
Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine said last month that the federal agency is working with health systems to find ways to lower emissions voluntarily. That gives Sherman hope for greener hospitals.
“Yes, I’m optimistic,” she said. “If I weren’t hopeful, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning.”
European regulators on Thursday took sharp aim at the common plastic additive BPA, slashing the recommended daily dose by 100,000 and all but ensuring the chemical cannot be used in any product coming into contact with food.
The decision, if it stands, promises to revolutionize the food contact materials industry—particularly food packaging and processing equipment—and bring BPA regulations in line with health research that scientists have been warning about for decades.
BPA is a key ingredient in polycarbonate plastic and epoxy resins—added to everything from Tupperware to food can liners. Scientists have long known the BPA leaches out of plastic and into food; virtually every human tested on the planet has some BPA in their blood.
BPA: No safe dose
Until Thursday, regulators have long held that some amount of BPA in our food and bodies is acceptable, with the US safety level about 12 times higher than European standards. But scientists have known since the 1990s that BPA has potentially harmful effects on reproduction, brain development, mammary gland health, and metabolism, among others.
The new proposed rule, from the European Food Safety Authority—Europe’s equivalent of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—makes the regulations congruent with that science.
A dose of BPA from a glass bottle with a BPA-laced sealant in the cap would likely be too high under Europe’s proposed rule, experts told EHN.
“They are acknowledging what many of us have known for many years: Even at very low doses, BPA causes harm,” said Laura Vandenberg, a professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Public Health & Health Sciences.
“Unfortunately that’s a decision that’s two decades too late. A whole generation of children have been allowed to be exposed to levels potentially causing harm.”
BPA rule ‘decades late’
In 2015, the EFSA set a temporary safety level of 4 micrograms per kilogram of body weight for daily BPA exposure, what regulators call a “tolerable daily intake.” For comparison, that’s roughly the amount of folic acid doctors recommend pregnant women take daily to ensure the health of their child.
In its draft re-evaluation of BPA, published today, EFSA’s expert Panel on Food Contact Materials, Enzymes and Processing Aids recommended setting the tolerable daily intake at 0.04 nanograms per kilogram of body weight per day – a 100,000-fold drop.
That’s the equivalent to taking the healthy serving size for cake from one slice to one-thousandths of a grain of flour.
The U.S., meanwhile, set the equivalent daily exposure level for BPA in 1988 at 50 micrograms per kilogram of body weight per day. It remains unchanged today.
“Thank goodness for the EFSA advisors, because this is decades late in coming,” said Terry Collins, a green chemist at Carnegie Mellon University.
“The challenge such lowering will produce for the chemical enterprise is massive, but for the sake of Europe’s fertility and its general health, regulators cannot back off this essential step.”
“All of Europe—every pocket of the ecosphere—is contaminated with BPA,” Collins added. “You can find it in translucent shrimp at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. It’s everywhere.”
Hormone hijackers
The European recommendation comes as regulators assess new scientific evidence on BPA and its impact to hormone, brain and body development, especially to the immune system, the EFSA said.
“This updated draft is the result of a thorough assessment over several years,” said Dr. Claude Lambré, chair of the CEP Food Contact Panel, in a statement. “The new scientific studies that have emerged in literature have helped us address important uncertainties about BPA’s toxicity.”
In the US, federal regulators have examined but discounted the same evidence via a process that an EHN.org investigation found to be highly problematic and “willfully blind.”
That study, dubbed CLARITY-BPA, found that even the lowest dose administered had bad effects, prompting scientists involved in the study to conclude that the safe dose of BPA would need to be at least 20,000 times lower than current federal standards. European regulators are pushing for an even lower safe dose.
“This divide between how European regulators regard BPA toxicity and the U.S. approach is going to provoke major challenges in trade and commerce —and fundamental questions about what US regulators are doing,” said Pete Myers, chief scientist for Environmental Health Sciences, publisher of EHN.org. “What do European regulators know that the US FDA is ignoring? They can’t both be right.”The American Chemistry Council did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
BPA is an endocrine disruptor, hijacking the body’s hormone functions at extraordinarily tiny concentrations. “What we’ve learned from literally tens of thousands of papers, is that endocrine activity is stimulated by very tiny quantities of endocrine hormones,” Collins told EHN.org for its investigation, “Exposed: How willful blindness keeps BPA on shelves and contaminating our bodies.”
“Really, if you look at the data, we shouldn’t be making these compounds, period.”
BPA in food, receipts
The proposed EFSA rules do have their limits.
They apply only to food-contact materials. BPA is also used in non-food applications, chiefly in paper used for cash register receipts and paper airline boarding passes and baggage tickets—though food is thought to be the major exposure route for BPA.
And the ruling only applies to BPA, not to the host of chemical cousins like BPS and BPF that have proliferated in recent years as a replacement for BPA. While consumers and regulators have focused on banning BPA, most of the chemical replacements have the same harmful health effects.
But the new limits are a start of a revolutionary new approach to assessing potential threats posed by chemicals used in everyday products, chemists said—one that should ripple across the Atlantic to the United States and throughout the chemical industry.
“There are consequences for industry, but there are also consequences for human health,” said Thomas Zoeller, Emeritus Professor at University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
“This is just a sledge hammer that is telling us that our risk assessment strategies are simply not working.”
Cookware, water bottles, and hundreds of other items made from recycled plastic worldwide may contain toxic chemicals harmful to human health, a new study has found.
The findings come as countries — including Canada — and companies aim to boost recycling rates in an effort to reduce plastic pollution. But now researchers with the International Pollutant Elimination Network (IPEN) warn those measures could inadvertently expose people to toxins.
The problem is most plastic items contain a suite of toxic chemical additives like bisphenol-A (BPA) or brominated flame retardants, which can cause endocrine issues and other health problems. While exposure to these chemicals may initially have been relatively low because of how the plastic was first used, once recycled into a new product, it could be subject to far more human contact.
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For instance, the plastics used inside electronics often contain harmful flame retardants, but they pose a low risk to humans because we interact with them relatively rarely. Yet once that plastic is melted down into pellets, it could feasibly end up in a recycled water bottle or in cookware where the risk of exposure is higher.
“It is worrisome that we find so many different chemicals in these pellets,” said Sara Brosché, an environmental chemist and IPEN science adviser. “And we don’t really have any control over what they are used for.”
The IPEN-commissioned study, which was not peer-reviewed, examined pellets collected in 24 different places worldwide made from high-density polyethylene (HDPE), a common plastic used in everything from toys to milk jugs. Pellets are small plastic beads that manufacturers melt down and use to make new plastic items.
Researchers then tested the samples for 18 chemical additives, at least a dozen of which have confirmed health impacts, including BPA and brominated flame retardants. All the samples contained at least one chemical additive, and the vast majority had more than three.
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The findings should be cause for concern, explained IPEN technical adviser Vito Buensante. Only about 10 per cent of the world’s plastic waste is currently recycled, but companies and several countries — including Canada — are developing policies to quickly make it more widespread. Key to these efforts is companies’ ability to source recycled plastic for cheap.
Right now, that’s a nearly impossible task because new plastic is far cheaper than recycled. As a result, most plastic waste is landfilled, incinerated, or ends up in the environment. Plastics that do get recycled are rarely tracked from origin to final product because of the cost.
While IPEN and other environmental groups and scholars argue efforts to reduce plastic pollution must start by reducing the production of new materials, Buensante noted that ensuring recycling laws created to manage the remaining plastic protect people from harmful chemicals is vital.
Cookware, water bottles, and hundreds of other items made from recycled plastic worldwide may contain toxic chemicals harmful to human health, a new study has found. #Plastics #RecycledPlastic
“When people say we need more recycling … this is not the recycling we’re looking for,” he said.
So far, there have been relatively few efforts to deal with the problem, including in Canada. Two international treaties — the Basel Convention and the Stockholm Convention — tackle the international plastic waste trade and persistent organic pollutants (POPs), like some flame retardants.
Most POPs are banned in Canada, including in items made from recycled plastics that contain the chemicals, Environment and Climate Change Canada’s (ECCC) said in a statement. The country’s international commitments also require it to ensure that when POPs become waste they aren’t “recovered, recycled, reclaimed, or reused.”
Earlier this year, Canada officially listed plastic as toxic under its environmental laws, a move expected to make the future regulation of plastics easier. ECCC’s efforts have primarily focused on eliminating some single-use plastics — a 2019 election promise from the Liberals — but also include proposals to boost recycling capacity, the ministry wrote.
Still, Canada and other countries need to take more extensive measures, like creating a system to track plastics from the moment they are created until they are broken down. Automakers have already created this type of system, Buensante said. Now it must become more widespread.
Both researchers also want countries to ban toxic additives in all plastics, reducing the risk of cross-contamination and harm to the environment and human health. IPEN is advocating for countries to include negotiations on banning harmful additives in a possible future international plastics treaty that will likely be proposed at the UN Environment Assembly meeting in February 2022.
If implemented, those rules would likely force us to change how plastic is used. Additives serve specific purposes — increasing flexibility or reducing flammability, for example — so a ban would force manufacturers and designers to develop alternate solutions. But the researchers noted it is a small price to pay when it comes to protecting people and the environment.
“No toxic chemicals should be added to plastics,” Brosché said.
Amazon’s plastic waste soars by a third amid pandemic, report finds
Online retailer disputes figures showing it produced 270,000 tonnes of packaging last year, with about 10,000 tonnes likely to end up in seas
Amazon’s plastic packaging waste soared by almost a third, to 270,000 tonnes, during the pandemic last year, according to a report from marine conservation group Oceana.
Oceana estimates up to 10,700 tonnes of this plastic, including air pillows, bubble wrap and plastic-lined paper envelopes, equivalent to a delivery van’s worth every 67 minutes, is likely to end up in the sea.
Amazon, the western world’s largest retailer, rejected Oceana’s figures and said it had overestimated the plastic waste by 300%. It also questioned the model used to estimate the percentage likely to enter the sea. It did not provide alternative figures.
The retailer saw a boom in sales of 38%, to $386bn (£290bn) in 2020, when much of the world was in lockdown and online sales increased.
Oceana’s report challenges the company’s recycling pledges, using interviews with local municipal waste officials, stores linked to by Amazon’s Second Chance recycling website and surveys of Amazon Prime customers. It concluded that the company’s recycling efforts “will not significantly reduce its enormous (and growing) plastic footprint”.
Matt Littlejohn, Oceana’s senior vice-president, said: “We are using the best data available to us. If Amazon was transparent, we would gladly use their data. Yes, they are using more non-plastic packaging, but they are also selling a ton more product.
“We understand people need Amazon. And so we’re hoping Amazon can fix this problem and become a leader in reducing plastic, which is really important for the oceans.”
Plastic film used by Amazon in its packaging has little or no value to the recycling market and is not generally accepted by municipal recycling schemes in the US, UK and Canada, the report said.
Oceana found that nearly 75% of Amazon Prime customers surveyed in 25 cities in the UK and US sent the plastic, knowingly or not, to landfill. Almost 40% put it in recycling bins, where the presence of plastic film would result in it going to the dump, and 35% disposed of the plastic in the bin. A little under 20% of 1,400 customers said they reused the plastic, while 5% said they placed the packaging in drop-off bins in stores on Amazon’s customer-driven recycling programme on the company’s Second Chance website.
Further, representatives at more than 40% of the stores that Amazon suggests as alternative recycling drop-offs for plastic film told secret shoppers that Amazon’s plastic film was not accepted.
Rachel Johnson Greer, a former programme manager at Amazon, who worked for the company for eight years, said the company would only take action on plastics if governments or a majority of customers demanded it.
Oceana has highlighted the action taken by the retailer in India, where it has eliminated single-use plastic packaging by using paper alternatives, after India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, and its central government pledged to ban single-use plastics by 2022. The ban was delayed, but a tribunal ruled that packaging was the responsibility of producers, importers and brand owners.
“If the company can do this in India and Germany, they can move away from single-use plastic packaging on a worldwide basis,” Littlejohn said.
An Amazon spokesperson said: “Amazon shares Oceana’s ambition to protect the world’s oceans and respects their work but, for a second year, their calculations are seriously flawed. They have overestimated our plastics usage by more than 300%, and use outdated assumptions about the sources of plastic waste entering our oceans.”
“Amazon is making rapid progress in reducing or removing single-use plastics from packaging materials in the UK and around the world.”
Among its initiatives to reduce plastic waste, Amazon is looking to double fully recyclable cushioned plastic in North America, replace single-use pillows in Australia with fully recyclable paper ones, and expand its packaging-free initiative to 100 cities across India, it said.
But one aspect of its operation remains contentious: the packaging. Like most dairy products in the U.S., Alexandre Family Farm’s milk and yogurt are sold in plastic jugs and containers, to the chagrin of some customers. Most plastic packaging is made from fossil fuels and more than 90 percent of it is not recycled. Instead, it fills our landfills, ends up as tiny particles in our soil and our bodies, and more than 8 million tons of it is dumped into oceans annually.
As more dairies turn to organic and regenerative practices, consumers are pushing for packaging that eliminates single-use plastics, and dairies like Alexandre are actively looking for new solutions. But, it turns out, there is no simple fix. Switching to glass milk bottles is one approach that has become popular among some consumers, but it comes with the potential for high carbon emissions and logistical challenges. New technologies, including containers made from plants, aren’t yet optimized for holding liquids. And, even if they were, our waste systems can’t process them, meaning most end up in landfills.
“We’re not happy to use plastic . . . but there aren’t yet alternative solutions, especially for beverage companies,” said Robert Brewer, Alexandre’s chief operating officer, who has been focused on finding new packaging since he was hired two years ago. “We just can’t continue to put billions of pounds of waste into the ocean and expect to have life on earth.”
“We’re not happy to use plastic, but there aren’t yet alternative solutions, especially for beverage companies.”
The dairy industry’s pursuit of new packaging also reflects the ongoing debate about whether society’s focus should be on inventing and refining disposable single-use packaging that is compostable or biodegradable or on improving recycling and reinforcing a circular economy that continues to rely on plastic. The makers of plant-based milks (almond, oat, rice, and soy)—many of which are also sold in plastic bottles—face similar conundrums.
Retailers, Distributors Refuse Glass Milk Bottles
Regardless of how milk is produced, in the U.S. most of it is sold in plastic containers made from virgin high-density polyethylene, also known as HDPE or No. 2 plastic. Nearly two-thirds of milk containers sold in North America are HDPE bottles, followed by cartons (24 percent) and plastic bags (7 percent). In recent years, some dairy companies—including Alexandre Family Farm—are turning to containers made from transparent, sturdy polyethylene terephthalate, which is also known as PET or No. 1 plastic, and commonly used in water bottles.
Reba Brindley, a project manager at the University of California, San Francisco, said she gave up on buying Alexandre’s milk specifically because it came in plastic bottles—a choice she finds incompatible with the farm’s other values.
“I am impressed by their work and dedication,” Brindley said of Alexandre. “But considering how little plastic is recycled and what an inefficient process it is, I don’t see how they can be held up as an environmental example when they pump out plastic bottles . . . I just can’t handle throwing out a plastic bottle every week.”
Brindley switched to milk from the Straus Family Creamery, which comes in reusable glass containers. “There is so much emphasis on recycling when I think we need to move towards reuse and reduce,” said Brindley.
Brindley is not alone in believing that glass—once the material of choice for milk bottles—is the dairy industry’s best shot at sustainability. Over the past decade, glass manufacturers have seen a resurgence of glass milk bottles across the U.S., particularly among small dairies and creameries. Some companies offer old-fashioned glass milk delivery to consumers’ doorsteps, while others offer reusable glass bottles that and can be returned to grocery stores, as in the case with Straus.
“There is so much emphasis on recycling when I think we need to move towards reuse and reduce.”
But while using glass may keep plastic out of landfills, prevent some toxic chemicals from leaching into our milk, and cater to our nostalgia and notions of improved taste and freshness, it’s not a panacea. Each packaging system has environmental impacts that go beyond the issue of solid waste, said Gregory Keoleian, professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan. Those environmental impacts stem from material production, manufacturing, use, and end-of-life processing and include energy, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use.
“There will be tradeoffs with respect to these impacts and also between packaging performance and cost,” Keoleian said.
Glass bottles weigh much more than other containers, so they take more energy to transport and result in higher transport-based emissions per volume of packaged milk. Extracting raw materials for new glass is also energy intensive, fueled mainly by natural gas. And only 31 percent of all glass containers are recycled—most end up in landfills, where they will take more 1 million years to decompose. Despite these drawbacks, when Keoleian and his colleagues studied milk packaging systems, they found that glass refillable bottles can outcompete single use containers such as plastic HDPE milk jugs and gable-top cartons with respect to energy and carbon footprints as long as they are reused at least five times—and the savings increases at higher reuse rates.
Keoleian’s research also found that refillable plastic bottles—which are not used much today— can have an even lower environmental impact than glass because they can have higher reuse rates. But the most sustainable choice for milk packaging? He says it’s lightweight plastic pouches, which are used mostly in Canada and have a significantly smaller environmental impact than reusable glass or plastic. Aluminum, which is recycled at very high rates, could also serve as a sustainable packaging for milk.
But most consumers want traditional bottles, Alexandre’s Brewer said, hence his dairy’s search for an alternative to standard plastic. Brewer was vice-president of sales and distribution for Straus from 2004 to 2008, overseeing its glass bottle reuse system. At the time, a significant number of retailers and distributors were willing to offer glass bottles, Brewer said. Today, it’s difficult to get them into large grocery chains.
The system, he adds, is a logistical nightmare. Straus buys the glass bottles, made of approximately 30 percent recycled glass, sanitizes, fills, and counts them. They are then sent to a distributor, who is charged a deposit. The distributor delivers the bottles to retailers who, in turn, are charged another deposit, and retailers then sell the milk to customers, who get charged yet another deposit. The whole process is then repeated backwards, until the used bottles are returned to Straus for sanitizing and refilling. In all, it entails six different accounting steps, Brewer said. In addition, the bottles can break during shipping, increasing costs.
So while Straus bottles are reused an average of five times before they are recycled (that number is primarily driven by the consumer return rate, which prior to the pandemic was close to 80 percent, and by ink wearing out on bottle labels), it’s a limited retail niche.
“It’s not a bad system, it’s just that we were told clearly by retailers and distributors that they were not willing to do it,” Brewer said. “They told us, ‘If you want to come into our stores, you have to put the milk in plastic bottles.’ So the choice was existential.”
A spokesperson from Straus Family Creamery, which has bottled its milk in reusable glass since 1994, told Civil Eats that “it may take longer for some stores to adapt and implement new sustainability programs.” But, the creamery added, the bottle logistics and accounting are not onerous once in place and “when retailers realize that there is demand among their shoppers . . . they are willing to invest time in developing the program with us and our distributor partners.” The creamery’s analysis has shown that its glass reuse program prevents approximately 500,000 pounds of milk containers and plastic out of the landfills each year.
Most major fast-food corporations in the West have banned plastic straws and replaced them with paper ones. (Getty Images)
The world is going through multiple simultaneous crises that compound one another and have one thing in common – their damaging consequences are caused by human hands.
Capable of the worst, but also the best, our species has become a living force able to do dire harm to the natural environment of our planet.
Even so, an army of conscientious thinkers is scrambling to find a solution that repairs the damage done by others, a result that is sadly less common than we would like to believe.
In fact, some of the policies we enthusiastically pursue to lessen or reverse these anthropogenic effects do not work at all, and seem to be aimed only at appeasing our guilty consciences.
There are multiple examples of such impulsive behaviours, as unhelpful as they are well-intentioned, that demonstrate our continued failure to plan on a grand scale, and that ‘seeing the big picture’ is too often beyond our means.
Is it feasible to combat the energy crisis by covering a large area of the Sahara Desert with solar panels? (Getty Images)
Let me explain this with a very simple example. From time-to-time, someone suggests combating the energy crisis by covering a large area of the Sahara Desert with solar panels. The efficacy of the idea is apparently so simple that it is hard to see any drawbacks.
However, doing something like this would alter the Earth’s albedo, which is the level of radiation that light surfaces (such as snow or sand) bounce back into space due to their refractive nature. The usually dark solar panels would trap more radiation, raising the average temperature of the desert. This, paradoxical as it may seem, would increase the level of rainfall in the Sahel, eventually turning the desert into a kind of orchard.
However, since the planet turns out to be an interconnected ‘whole’, the butterfly effect would cause an identical but opposite effect to appear on the other side of the Earth, let’s say the Amazon, which could end up becoming a desert, trapping Brazil in everlasting droughts (something that is already beginning to be seen due to the deforestation encouraged by Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro).
But important as this issue is, another much closer to home is the epidemic of paper straws that has flooded fast-food restaurants, cafes and bars. The idea, like that of solar panels in the Sahara, appeared unimpeachable.
The little plastic tubes with which we have traditionally – and quite efficaciously – sipped our drinks were ending up in the oceans, polluting the environment and causing horrific damage to beautiful and vulnerable creatures like sea turtles.
What else was there to do but pile into a crusade that would involve using paper straws that turn into toilet-flavoured mush at the first sip?
Let’s start, however, with the story of the turtle, as it is extremely interesting and a textbook example of the emergence of habits that apparently favour sustainability, but which, when it comes down to it, do not pass the scientific test.
The myth of the environmental efficacy of today’s absorbent straws, famous for self-destructing in three seconds, started in the place where all things happen lately – on social media.
In 2015, a biologist named Christine Figgener uploaded a video to Facebook that she had recorded while conducting fieldwork in Costa Rican waters for her PhD, a study on the migratory patterns of olive ridley sea turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea).
Biologist Christine Figgener uploaded a video to Facebook showing the struggle to remove a plastic straw from a turtle.
In the extremely unpleasant video, Figgener and her expedition companions are seen struggling to remove a plastic object embedded in a turtle’s nostril. The video of the chelonian, which visibly suffers and bleeds during the extraction, immediately went viral and has now been watched more than 44 million times on YouTube.
The social reaction to the moving scene was instantaneous. Most major fast-food corporations in the Western world banned plastic straws and replaced them with paper ones, and the movement resonated among most of our governments as well (the EU banned plastic straws earlier this year).
It is impossible not to empathise with the turtle while watching the video. In fact, it is so unbearable that one tends to think that we are the cancer of the planet, and that the plastic straws thrown in the rubbish by some guy from Madrid, Vancouver or Sydney at his local burger joint will invariably end up killing a turtle in the distant tropics.
Really? Well, no, not at all. I’m afraid that our chewing of wet cellulose as we sip our gin and tonic is little more than foolishness, and I’m going to explain why.
According to a study published in 2017, 95% of all plastic in the Earth’s oceans comes from only 10 rivers. Eight of them are in Asia and the other two are in Africa. Another group specialising in ocean conservation similarly estimated that most of the plastics reaching the sea come mainly from five countries: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.
I’m sure some people think that these studies have a pro-Western bias, and that the aim is to hide the problem by blaming less developed countries, but think about one thing. The straw that your child throws in the rubbish bin at the burger joint ends up with others in a bag in a container for plastic recycling
Most developed countries are developed because, among other things, they manage their waste efficiently. So even if the straws don’t end up being recycled, they will end up buried under tons of soil in a location where they are unlikely to reach the oceans.
Unfortunately, the straw that Figgener and her colleagues so painfully extracted from the turtle in the video almost certainly came from an Asian country where rubbish is not managed correctly.
Some 95% of all plastic in the Earth’s oceans comes from only 10 rivers. Eight of them are in Asia and the other two are in Africa. (Getty Images)
At the same time, we have also identified another major problem. Most of the plastic that ends up in the oceans, forming floating islands that continue to grow in size, comes from fishing or shipping gear that ‘falls off’ merchant ships.
Indeed, this is the origin of some 46% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is already three times the size of France. Unfortunately, until this gear breaks down into small pieces, it can cause the death of many marine creatures.
We therefore have reliable information we can use as a basis for solutions that are not as far-fetched as adopting paper straws. It would be enough to create programmes in developing countries in which fishermen and seafarers would be paid for their old gear, thus discouraging the easy and destructive solution of throwing it into the sea when it is no longer of use.
As for the treatment of waste in the five most polluting countries, the solution would be to provide funds to their emerging economies so that they can invest in efficient waste management systems.
So easy, yet so complicated.
Watch: Should we get rid of single-use plastic items?
Bugs across globe are evolving to eat plastic, study finds
Surprising discovery shows scale of plastic pollution and reveals enzymes that could boost recycling
Microbes in oceans and soils across the globe are evolving to eat plastic, according to a study.
The research scanned more than 200m genes found in DNA samples taken from the environment and found 30,000 different enzymes that could degrade 10 different types of plastic.
The study is the first large-scale global assessment of the plastic-degrading potential of bacteria and found that one in four of the organisms analysed carried a suitable enzyme. The researchers found that the number and type of enzymes they discovered matched the amount and type of plastic pollution in different locations.
The results “provide evidence of a measurable effect of plastic pollution on the global microbial ecology”, the scientists said.
Millions of tonnes of plastic are dumped in the environment every year, and the pollution now pervades the planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. Reducing the amount of plastic used is vital, as is the proper collection and treatment of waste.
But many plastics are currently hard to degrade and recycle. Using enzymes to rapidly break down plastics into their building blocks would enable new products to be made from old ones, cutting the need for virgin plastic production. The new research provides many new enzymes to be investigated and adapted for industrial use.
“We found multiple lines of evidence supporting the fact that the global microbiome’s plastic-degrading potential correlates strongly with measurements of environmental plastic pollution – a significant demonstration of how the environment is responding to the pressures we are placing on it,” said Prof Aleksej Zelezniak, at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
Jan Zrimec, also at Chalmers University, said: “We did not expect to find such a large number of enzymes across so many different microbes and environmental habitats. This is a surprising discovery that really illustrates the scale of the issue.”
The explosion of plastic production in the past 70 years, from 2m tonnes to 380m tonnes a year, had given microbes time to evolve to deal with plastic, the researchers said.The study, published in the journal Microbial Ecology, started by compiling a dataset of 95 microbial enzymes already known to degrade plastic, often found in bacteria in rubbish dumps and similar places rife with plastic.
The team then looked for similar enzymes in environmental DNA samples taken by other researchers from 236 different locations around the world. Importantly, the researchers ruled out potential false positives by comparing the enzymes initially identified with enzymes from the human gut, which is not known to have any plastic-degrading enzymes.
About 12,000 of the new enzymes were found in ocean samples, taken at 67 locations and at three different depths. The results showed consistently higher levels of degrading enzymes at deeper levels, matching the higher levels of plastic pollution known to exist at lower depths.
The soil samples were taken from 169 locations in 38 countries and 11 different habitats and contained 18,000 plastic-degrading enzymes. Soils are known to contain more plastics with phthalate additives than the oceans and the researchers found more enzymes that attack these chemicals in the land samples.
Nearly 60% of the new enzymes did not fit into any known enzyme classes, the scientists said, suggesting these molecules degrade plastics in ways that were previously unknown.
“The next step would be to test the most promising enzyme candidates in the lab to closely investigate their properties and the rate of plastic degradation they can achieve,” said Zelezniak. “From there you could engineer microbial communities with targeted degrading functions for specific polymer types.”
The first bug that eats plastic was discovered in a Japanese waste dump in 2016. Scientists then tweaked it in 2018 to try to learn more about how it evolved, but inadvertently created an enzyme that was even better at breaking down plastic bottles. Further tweaks in 2020 increased the speed of degradation sixfold.
Another mutant enzyme was created in 2020 by the company Carbios that breaks down plastic bottles for recycling in hours. German scientists have also discovered a bacterium that feeds on the toxic plastic polyurethane, which is usually dumped in landfills.
Last week, scientists revealed that the levels of microplastics known to be eaten by people via their food caused damage to human cells in the laboratory.
This story was originally published by The Guardian and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Microplastics cause damage to human cells in the laboratory at the levels known to be eaten by people via their food, a study has found.
The harm included cell death and allergic reactions and the research is the first to show this happens at levels relevant to human exposure. However, the health impact on humans is uncertain because it is not known how long microplastics remain in the body before being excreted.
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The research analyzed 17 previous studies which looked at the toxicological impacts of microplastics on human cell lines. The scientists compared the level of microplastics at which damage was caused to the cells with the levels consumed by people through contaminated drinking water, seafood and table salt.
They found specific types of harm — cell death, allergic response, and damage to cell walls — were caused by the levels of microplastics that people ingest.
“Harmful effects on cells are in many cases the initiating event for health effects,” said Evangelos Danopoulos of Hull York Medical School, U.K., who led the research published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials. “We should be concerned. Right now, there isn’t really a way to protect ourselves.”
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Future research could make it possible to identify the most contaminated foods and avoid them, he said, but the ultimate solution was to stop the loss of plastic waste: “Once the plastic is in the environment, we can’t really get it out.”
Research on the health impact of microplastics is ramping up quickly, Danopoulos said: “It is exploding and for good reason. We are exposed to these particles every day: we’re eating them, we’re inhaling them. And we don’t really know how they react with our bodies once they are in.”
The research also showed irregularly shaped microplastics caused more cell death than spherical ones. This is important for future studies as many microplastics bought for use in laboratory experiments are spherical, and therefore may not be representative of the particles humans ingest.
“We should be concerned. Right now, there isn’t really a way to protect ourselves,” says lead researcher Evangelos Danopoulos of Hull York Medical School, U.K. #PlasticWaste #Health #Microplastics
“This work helps inform where research should be looking to find real-world effects,” said microplastics researcher Steve Allen. “It was interesting that shape was so important to toxicity, as it confirms what many plastic pollution researchers believed would be happening — that pristine spheres used in lab experiments may not be showing the real-world effects.”
Danopoulos said the next step for researchers was to look at studies of microplastic harm in laboratory animals — experiments on human subjects would not be ethical. In March, a study showed tiny plastic particles in the lungs of pregnant rats pass rapidly into the hearts, brains and other organs of their fetuses.
Coastal species are forming colonies on plastic trash in the ocean, study finds
Termed “neopelagic communities”, these colonies are thriving in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and going where the current flows
Masses of ocean plastic are providing artificial habitat for otherwise coastal species, according to a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal, Nature Communications.
The study’s authors observed floating water bottles, old toothbrushes and matted fishing nets. The possibility exists that species may be evolving to better adapt to life on plastic.
A decade ago, marine researchers believed coastal organisms, which evolved to live along sheltered shorelines, could not survive a trip across the inhospitable open ocean. Yet Japan’s 2011 tsunami, which sent some 300 species of Asian marine life riding durable and buoyant plastic garbage onto North American shores, disproved that assumption.
Now, researchers have a term for these drifters: “neopelagic communities”, seafaring colonies of anemones, brittle stars, shrimp, barnacles and more, which are thriving on plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and washing up wherever the currents take them.
Ocean plastic is “… creating opportunities for coastal species’ biogeography to greatly expand beyond what we previously thought was possible”, Linsey Haram, a research associate at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and coauthor of the study, said in a release.
The concept of organism-encrusted plastic may sound like the story of ocean species triumphing in spite of human folly. But that’s not quite the case, explains Juan José Alava, PhD, an expert in marine ecotoxicology and conservation at the University of British Columbia.
In addition to transporting non-native species to delicate habitats where they may become invasive and destructive, neopelagic communities are “basically an ecological trap” says Alava. That’s because the sheer density of plastic in the ocean (researchers expect 600m metric tons of garbage will collect in the ocean by 2040) leads to the creation of permanent floating structures, covered in small species that attract creatures higher up the food chain, such as fish, turtles and mammals. When these creatures enter garbage gyres seeking shelter and food, they run a high risk of eating and/or becoming caught in plastic and dying. “For example, often the calves of whales, they are very curious – but that curiosity could lead them to get entangled and die,” says Alava.
While scientists have found some types of bacteria are able to break down hydrocarbons in plastic, thereby cleaning up garbage, it’s unlikely that the types of filter-feeding invertebrates thriving in neopelagic communities will have any such effect.
“The 2021 UN report after Cop26 was clear that the scale of rapidly increasing plastic pollution is putting the health of all the world’s oceans and seas at risk,” says Alava.
This guide was developed to help provide an overview of chemicals and toxins used in food containers, as well as the related negative health impacts. We provide context and background information to help you understand which chemicals are used, why they are of concern, and how regulations aim to reduce the toxicity of food containers.
See the table of contents below for quick navigation.
Summary of Key Takeaways
Food containers include anything that comes into contact with food, such as containers, packaging, and dishes.
Food containers are often made of plastic, which is produced using thousands of chemicals.
Chemicals used in food containers can “migrate” from the plastic into the food.
Chemicals used in food containers such as BPA, phthalates and PFAS can cause negative health impacts. More research is needed to study the toxicity of these chemicals and the thousands of other chemicals used in food containers.
Some countries and states have implemented regulations to try and combat the use of unsafe chemicals in materials that touch food.
The definition of food containers is quite broad, and includes anything that comes into contact with food, including containers, packaging, utensils, kitchen equipment and dishes. These materials are known to regulators as food contact materials (FCMs) or food contact substances (FCSs). Food containers may be made of a variety of materials including plastics, rubber, paper and metal.
The majority of food containers use plastics, as they are resistant to water and grease. Plastic is a popular choice for food storage or transport as plastic containers are hygienic, easy to clean (and keep sterile), convenient, and help maintain a food’s shelf life.
Despite the material’s popularity, there is little information on the long-term effects of plastics, plastic coatings, and plasticizers when it comes to our health. Food contact materials, including plastic ones, are made up of thousands of chemicals, although not all of these are toxic. However, greater than 60 percent of the chemicals used in food containers have an unknown toxicity.
Which Chemicals Are Used in Food Containers?
There are thousands of chemicals used in food containers, but there is little information on each substance. Health experts have identified three substances of high concern: bisphenol A (BPA), phthalates, and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
Visit this database for a more complete list of Food Contact Chemicals (Groh et al. 2020). The database now includes ~12,000 distinct chemicals used in the manufacture of food contact materials and articles worldwide.
Bisphenol A (BPA) – Bisphenol is a chemical substance that is industrially produced. In fact, BPA is one of the most highly produced chemicals in the world, with over 2 million tonnes being produced worldwide per year.
BPA substance is colorless, and is used primarily to harden plastics. A derivative of BPA is used in epoxy resins. BPA is used in food storage containers such as the inner coatings of food cans, baby bottles, pitchers, tableware, and water bottles. These hard plastics may be identified by the recycling number 7 on the bottom of the product.
Despite BPA’s usefulness, many manufacturers are phasing it out due to health concerns. Most baby bottles made in the United States have not used BPA since 2009.
Phthalates – Phthalates are a class of chemicals known as plasticizers. Phthalates are most commonly added to PVC (polyvinyl chloride) to soften the plastic and increase its flexibility and durability. PVC is the third-most widely produced plastic polymer, with about 40 million tonnes produced per year.
Phthalates are used as plasticizers in PVC food packaging such as clear vinyl packaging or shrink wrap. PVC may also be used to create “blister packaging,” individual plastic pockets, for gum. The use of phthalates is decreasing in food packaging due to health concerns and safety regulations.
Plastics that may contain phthalates may be identified by the recycling number 3 on the bottom of the product.
Per/Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) – Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS or “forever chemicals”, are a manmade class of chemicals widely used in a number of applications. After their invention in the 1930s, PFAS became extremely popular due to their ability to repel oil, water, and grease.
PFAS contain bonds between carbon and fluorine atoms, which is an extremely strong chemical bond that is difficult to break down. Thus, PFAS are often referred to as “forever chemicals” due to their extreme environmental persistence.
PFAS are often used as a treatment to make food containers resistant to grease or water. This includes fiber-based packaging, such as pizza boxes or fast-food containers, as well as nonstick cookware.
The most common PFAS chemicals are perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), which are no longer produced in the U.S. Many manufacturers have replaced these chemicals with other PFAS or other chemicals.
Exposure to Chemicals in Food Containers
The main method by which humans are exposed to chemicals in food containers is through migration of the chemicals into food. Laboratory and real-world studies show that chemicals in packaging materials almost always leach into food, even if it is only small quantities.
A 2020 meta analysis notes that around 1200 peer-reviewed studies demonstrate migration of chemicals from food contact materials into food (Muncke et al., 2020). Thus, food contact materials are a clear pathway for human exposure to chemicals.
The extent of how much migration occurs depends on various factors, including:
Characteristics of the packaging (such as thickness and chemistry)
Food temperature
Storage time
Size of the packaging surface in contact with food
Studies do not exist for many of the thousands of chemicals used in food contact materials. Not only is it difficult to obtain information about chemicals used in food contact materials, including the amounts used, but there is also very little information about these chemicals’ ability to migrate into food and expose humans. This lack of information extends to the impacts on human health, as many of these chemicals also have little to no hazard testing performed.
BPA, Phthalates, and PFAS Leaching
BPA, Phthalates and PFAS are among the most researched food contact chemicals as they are both widely used and they are of health concern.
A 2017 study showed that PFAS in grease-resistant food packaging can leach into food and increase dietary exposure. This conclusion was reached after studying around 400 samples of food contact papers, cardboard containers, and beverage containers from fast-food restaurants (Schaider et al., 2017).
Multiple studies show the presence of BPA, phthalates or PFAS chemicals in the human body as a result of exposure through food contact materials. A 2011 study from the Silent Spring Institute showed that BPA and bis(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (also known as DEHP) can be detected in people, but that the levels of these chemicals in the human body are significantly reduced when diets are restricted to limited packaging (i.e. when exposure to food contact materials is decreased) (Rudel et al., 2011). Exposure to BPA is heightened when packaging containing BPA is heated.
It has also been shown that PFAS levels are higher in people who have recently eaten food from a fast food, pizza or other restaurant, or who have eaten popcorn from microwaveable bags (Susmann et al., 2019). Exposure to these chemicals is widespread; a 2003-2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted by the CDC found detectable levels of BPA in 93% of over 2500 urine samples from people ages six and up. The same study found that measurable levels of phthalate metabolites are common in the general U.S. population.
Health Impacts of Chemicals in Food Containers
Chemicals from food containers can have serious impacts on human health. In addition to being known hormone disruptors, BPA, phthalates, and PFAS may cause disease and other health issues.
Chemicals in food containers act as hormone disruptors. Source: NIEHS
BPA – The toxicity of BPA remains controversial, as some studies show negative health impacts while others do not. To date, the US FDA considers bisphenol A (BPA) to be safe as a food contact material.
However, some research shows that BPA is an endocrine-disrupting chemical (EDC), and toxic for reproduction. It causes developmental effects in laboratory animals. Some human studies indicate BPA exposure is related to health effects like diabetes or heart disease.
Phthalates – The human health effects of phthalates are also subject to some debate. Some studies show that phthalates act as endocrine disruptors and affect reproduction. However, more research is needed on the effects of phthalates on humans.
One study estimated phthalate exposures are associated with around 100,000 American deaths per year, but a direct causal link is not yet proven (Trasande et al., 2021).
PFAS – PFAS are particularly dangerous because they are very slow to break down and can bioaccumulate in the environment or the human body over time. Peer-reviewed studies have shown that exposure to PFAS (particularly at high levels) can cause serious health effects.
PFOA and PFOS in particular are known to cause reproductive and developmental, liver and kidney, and immunological effects in lab animals, as well as tumors. In humans, they cause increased cholesterol levels, low infant birth weights, effects on the immune system, cancer (PFOA), and thyroid hormone disruption (PFOS).
Part of the difficulty of determining the health impacts of PFAS is that there are thousands of different PFAS chemicals that may have varying uses, exposure pathways, and toxicities. Additionally, people may be affected by PFAS differently at different times in their lives.
Toxicity of Food Contact Chemicals: An Ongoing Question
The true extent of health impacts caused by food contact materials are still unknown. While many nations regulate food contact materials because the risk of migration of chemicals into food is recognized, the vast majority of approved food contact materials have been inadequately studied or have unknown toxicities.
Additionally, many studies showing negative impacts of food contact chemicals have been performed only on laboratory animals, and must be confirmed in humans.
Environmental Impacts of Chemicals in Food Containers
While chemical leaching through food containers is one of the most direct exposure routes for humans, BPA, phthalates, PFAS and other chemicals typically used in food containers are found in the environment as well.
Chemicals in containers can enter the environment:
Directly through manufacturing of plastics
Indirectly through disposal of chemical-containing materials
While containers and packaging make up a large percentage of waste produced in the U.S., very little is recycled (EPA Report about Materials, Waste, and Recycling). For example, in 2018, over 14,000 tons of plastic packaging were produced, and 10,090 of those tons went to landfill. Less than ⅓ was recycled.
When plastics are put into landfill rather than properly recycled, BPA and other chemicals can leach out into the environment over time. Chemical leaching into water or soil can have severe impacts on the environment as well as on humans. Drinking chemical-contaminated water can introduce chemicals into the human body, as can eating food grown in contaminated soil. Industrial chemicals in water also impact wildlife, causing developmental and reproductive problems.
Food Contact Materials Regulations
In the U.S., chemicals must prove toxicity above certain thresholds to be disapproved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Most PFAS, BPA, and phthalates remain legally approved for use in food contact materials, as the FDA does not have sufficient evidence of their toxicity.
The FDA’s Food Contact Notification (FCN) Program allows for industry registration of new food contact materials, with a defined package of supporting safety information (toxicological, chemical, and environmental). After a 120-day time period to raise objections, the packaging materials are automatically legally approved.
Some countries are choosing to exercise caution and seek alternatives to these chemicals in food contact materials. BPA is banned in France and PFAS is banned in food packaging in Denmark. Canada is taking steps to ban BPA in baby bottles, although they acknowledge this is a precautionary level, as studies do not indicate exposure levels that cause health effects.
The European Union has no specific legislation and instead, has general legislation that leaves it up to manufacturers to ensure that food contact materials “do not transfer their constituents to food in quantities which could endanger human health” (EU Framework Regulation).
Why is Regulation Difficult?
Lack of Information – Part of the difficulty in banning these substances is that extensive research is required to assess the health and environmental impacts of large numbers of individual chemicals; the chemical class of PFAS alone comprises thousands of chemicals. Therefore, only a few PFAS are banned.
Controversy Over Toxicity Levels – Additionally, U.S. regulations are based on the amount of chemical believed to be ingested as a result of different food packaging, and how toxic this amount is believed to be. However, there is controversy about how much chemical is 1) dangerous to ingest and 2) is ingested by the average American, and some scientists believe the U.S. determinations of toxicity are too narrow.
Scientists propose that PFAS be managed as a chemical class to move towards eliminating their non-essential uses, developing safer alternatives, and developing methods to remove existing PFAS from the environment. (Kwiatkowski et al., 2020).
The EU and other countries are currently compiling research on chemicals in food contact materials intended to support legislation protecting public health. Read more about the European Food Safety Authority’s research efforts.
More Resources
Podcasts
You Make Me Sick – This episode of the Environmental Defense Fund’s Health podcast talks with Dr. Ami Zota about the presence of food packaging chemicals in people’s urine after eating fast food.
The Joe Rogan Experience Episode #1638 – This episode with Dr. Shanna Swan discusses research showing declining fertility rates in the U.S. due to chemical exposure.
Health in a Heartbeat – This UFHealth podcast discusses the dangers of phthalates in plastics.
Books
Our Daily Poison: From Pesticides to Packaging, How Chemicals Have Contaminated the Food Chain and Are Making Us Sick by Marie-Monique Robin (Kirkus Reviews)
Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, Threatening Sperm Counts, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race by Shanna H. Swan with Stacey Colino (NYTimes Review).
Model Toxics in Packaging Legislation for U.S. States – The Toxics in Packaging Clearinghouse (TPCH) maintains the Model Toxics in Packaging Legislation that can be picked up by individual states for implementation of state legislation based on the Model. This model has been used by 19 states to create their own legislation.
Food Packaging Product Stewardship Considerations – The Institute of Packaging Professionals – Food Safety Alliance for Packaging has developed its own voluntary guidance recommending against several chemicals (e.g. phthalates, BPA, and some PFAS).
Groh, K. J., Backhaus, T., Carney-Almroth, B., Geueke, B., Inostroza, P. A., Lennquist, A., … & Muncke, J. (2019). Overview of known plastic packaging-associated chemicals and their hazards. Science of the total environment, 651, 3253-3268. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969718338828
Kwiatkowski, C. F., Andrews, D. Q., Birnbaum, L. S., Bruton, T. A., DeWitt, J. C., Knappe, D. R., … & Blum, A. (2020). Scientific basis for managing PFAS as a chemical class. Environmental Science & Technology Letters, 7(8), 532-543. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.estlett.0c00255
Muncke, J., Andersson, A. M., Backhaus, T., Boucher, J. M., Almroth, B. C., Castillo, A. C., … & Scheringer, M. (2020). Impacts of food contact chemicals on human health: a consensus statement. Environmental Health, 19(1), 1-12. https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-020-0572-5
Rand, A. A., & Mabury, S. A. (2011). Perfluorinated carboxylic acids in directly fluorinated high-density polyethylene material. Environmental science & technology, 45(19), 8053-8059. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/es1043968
Rudel, R. A., Gray, J. M., Engel, C. L., Rawsthorne, T. W., Dodson, R. E., Ackerman, J. M., … & Brody, J. G. (2011). Food packaging and bisphenol A and bis (2-ethyhexyl) phthalate exposure: findings from a dietary intervention. Environmental health perspectives, 119(7), 914-920. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3223004/
Schaider, L. A., Balan, S. A., Blum, A., Andrews, D. Q., Strynar, M. J., Dickinson, M. E., … & Peaslee, G. F. (2017). Fluorinated compounds in US fast-food packaging. Environmental science & technology letters, 4(3), 105-111. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.estlett.6b00435
Susmann, H. P., Schaider, L. A., Rodgers, K. M., & Rudel, R. A. (2019). Dietary habits related to food packaging and population exposure to PFASs. Environmental health perspectives, 127(10), 107003. https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP4092
Zimmermann, L., Dierkes, G., Ternes, T. A., Völker, C., & Wagner, M. (2019). Benchmarking the in vitro toxicity and chemical composition of plastic consumer products. Environmental science & technology, 53(19), 11467-11477. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b02293
